The Florida Legislature is at a decade-long low of productivity, columnist Paul Flemming says.

As Republicans are so apt to say: If you don't measure performance, how do you know how you're doing? If you don't keep score, how do you know if you won?

The Florida Legislature is at a decade-long low of productivity.

This is the best news I've reported in a long time. Here are some highlights of the scorecard from the 60 days between March 5 and May 3.

Lawmakers in the just-concluded regular session filed fewer bills than in any other session in the last decade. They passed the second-fewest bills in the last 10 years.

There were 1,848 bills filed for the 2013 session, nearly evenly divided between the House and Senate. That's the fewest since 2004 and 22 percent less than the decade average of 2,361.

There were 286 of those filed bills that passed both the House and Senate in identical form and have been, or will be, sent to the governor's desk for his signature or veto. Back in 2009, when the full force of the economic collapse was hitting state coffers, the Legislature managed to pass fewer bills, 271.

The total bills passed this year is 43 percent less than the high-water mark of the last decade, when 500 bills were passed during the 2004 legislative session.

As Thomas Jefferson actually never said, "That government which governs best, governs least."

Or you might favor the fake Mark Twain quote: "No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session." (Note to Facebook users: Morgan Freeman didn't say it, either.)

Much of what the Legislature did manage to pass had as its main purpose undoing what a previous version had done.

Thus the much-ballyhooed elections bill roughly returns us to the pre-2011 status on early-voting days, reinstating much of the law as it was before that Republican Legislature passed its bill to address "voter fraud" (read, Democratic votes).

Among the passed bills that did nothing but fiddle with the wisdom of previous sessions: A bill that continued the Republican effort to erase anything former Gov. Charlie Crist had to do with from the record and would end the requirement that gasoline be blended with ethanol.

One bill just fixed a screw-up and we will no longer require Canadians to get a special international driving permit.

Another bill continued to tweak red-light camera enforcement and barred the ability to ticket right turns on red.

Then there were the bills that allow the sale of wine from 5.16-gallon canisters and restrict the use of drones by cops for automated surveillance. I'm not against either of these bills. In fact, I favor them. I just don't know if Florida would have ceased to exist without either one.

After two years, lawmakers did manage to pass a bill that establishes for citizens a definitive right to speak before governmental bodies.

Lots of horrible legislation failed, and for that we can be thankful. The Legislature failed to pass the anti-sharia law bill, a proposal born of equal measure from religious bigotry, jingoism and conspiracy theories. Also defeated was a proposal to give parents with children at failing schools the opportunity to petition school districts for charter-school takeovers, a right Sen. Bill Montford correctly pointed out parents already have.

Lawmakers, of course, managed to pass the only thing they're required to do, a $74.5 billion budget. But they cheated. They were already working with projections of more than $2.5 billion in tax revenues beyond what came in this year. Even with that, lawmakers stuck their hands in the cookie jar.

The budget is balanced with the aid of $385 million in sweeps from trust funds - money collected with the promise it would be used for a specific purpose but instead is redirected into the general-revenue pot. It's legal. The Legislature can do it, and the move was a critical tactic in the tough budget years in the recent past to save already stripped programs from further hard times.

But now the Legislature has, in the past six budgets, swept out $3.8 billion from trust funds. Among the hardest hit are trust funds dedicated to affordable housing. Once again, the Local Government Housing Trust Fund was swept, this year to the tune of $151 million.

More revenue coming in made budget negotiations relatively easy this year, with House and Senate conferees often rounding up differences to the higher amount.

But they did the same thing with trust-fund sweeps. Gov. Rick Scott's budget proposed only $174 million in trust-fund sweeps. Early House allocations included $309 million in trust-fund sweeps. And so, somehow, we end up with $385 million in sweeps.

Enough. Stop it. No more sweeps.

But keep up the good work of getting less done.

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Paul Flemming: Legislative session scorecard

In the Florida Legislature, less can be more, says columnist Paul Flemming.